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vineri, 11 noiembrie 2011

Scalable Link Building Using Social Media - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 12:54 PM PST

This week we are thrilled to have Mike King join us again for another amazing Whiteboard Friday. As marketers and SEOs we all have asked our selves at one time or another how we can use Social Media to build links. Mike lays out a very scalable way to build links for just about any business. Enjoy and share your thoughts below in the comments.

Video Transcription

Greetings and salutations, SEOmoz fans. My name is Michael King, and we're going to talk about scalable link building using social media. Follow me on Twitter, iPullRank.

So the first thing you want to do is identify your audience, and you're going to use industry demographic data from sources like comScore, QuantCast, and Compete. These are paid tools, but they do give you a lot of stuff for free. So just play around with them until you can figure out what you can get.

From there, you also want to use social listening tools. There are a couple of free ones, and there are some paid ones as well. So, the free ones are Social Mention and Amplicate. Basically, what you are going to do is you put in a keyword, and it's going to give you back all the people talking about that keyword. You can use that to figure out who your audience is because what we're going to ultimately do is get to the personas. I'm going to get to that in a second.

There are some paid tools, such as Radian6, Scout Labs, and Alterian SM2. They're really extensive, but they're also kind of expensive. So you may not be able to use those. If you can't, you can get a lot of stuff out of Social Mention and Amplicate.

With all that information, what we're going to do is create four core groups, and these are our personas. They're a representation of the four groups of people in your audience. So, in this case, we have Music Moms, Happy Hobbyists, Raging Rock Stars, and Involved Instructors. So what we've identified, we're talking about a guitar company and these are their audience. What we have identified are these four groups of people.

Music Moms are people that typically have children that are Happy Hobbyists. They're the hip mom who wants to buy the guitar for their son. They're trying to figure out which guitar is best.

Then, you have the Happy Hobbyists. These are the people that make the most content in this space. They've learned all of these cool things from their Involved Instructors, and they're at home on YouTube practicing, showing you their favorite song and they're playing it. They're typically, like I said, learning how to play an instrument.

Raging Rock Stars are typically independent musicians or even celebrity musicians. We would reach out to these people as influencers and for guest posts, things of that nature.

Involved Instructors are the people that are teaching your Happy Hobbyists how to play an instrument, and they're also involved in the conversation, talking about which guitars are the best, which piano should I get my Happy Hobbyist student to buy.

Once we have these people, we figured out what words go with these people, and we can go to Follower Wonk with these keywords and identify them. In the case of Music Moms, you can type in "music mom" and you get a whole list of moms that are into music and may have children that are Happy Hobbyists.

Happy Hobbyists, you could type in "guitar student," and you're going to get a whole bunch of kids that are guitar students. So, what you want to do is use that in concert with the Scraper Tool for Chrome. It's a plug-in, and you can right click one of the names, and it will give you all these people in Google Docs so then you can export them to Excel or whatever it is.

From there, what you want to do is use Knowem.com, and you can put in people's user names and see where they are on the different places throughout social media, because most people use the same user name for all their different social media profiles. For example, Rand Fish, if you put it in Knowem, you see that he has YouTube, SlideShare, MySpace, Squidoo, Foursquare.

You can look at all of these things together and figure out what that person is into and create a mental model and use that for context when you contact them. From there, what you also want to do is create an industry specific persona for yourself. The reason you want to do that is because, let's say you did your link building through Twitter using your SEO Twitter. Then someone came back to your profile and they're looking at all of this stuff about link building. They're not going to believe you. They know that you're just trying to get a link.

It's the same thing as if you were a pickup artist and then you gave your girlfriend a copy of Neil Strauss' book. It's not going to work. No, don't do that. So, create a persona for yourself with all types of information and posts and content about your industry, and that way when people see that, they're like, "Oh, this person is an authority. They're genuine."

Then, what you want to do is make sure that your messaging stands out. If you're going with email, make sure your subjects are short. Make sure your subjects are natural. Don't use link requests in your subject because nobody will ever open it. The whole point of making these messages stand out in the inbox is that they actually open the message. So, you want to send email as a person, not as a company, not as a web theme. You want to send it as an actual person. Then you also want to include a natural citation because that's what shows up on the bar in Gmail, and they're going to get that preview. If it's like "Dear Sir or Madam," they're not going to open it.

Now, Twitter is actually better for outreach link building because people are expecting to be hit up with inane conversation and unsolicited conversation. What you want to make sure you do is converse with context. If they've mention guitars, respond to their question if they had a question or say, "Hey, I saw something that goes with what you're talking about." Don't spam them. Don't just send them a link and be like, "Hey, here's my link. Link to me." No, it doesn't work. Nobody likes spam. You don't like spam.

Escalate quickly. You want to also, as soon as you're in that conversation say, "Hey, follow me so that I can DM you." Then you can take that conversation offline. Then you can get the email easily, stuff like that. You just want to be able to talk to them privately. Then, you need to continually participate. That goes back to this point of create an industry specific persona because that way, if you're participating, you're constantly putting up content related to that thing, and people are like, "Hey, I'm going to follow this guy."

Also, write relevant hashtags. So if it's something about music or something about guitars, post your content, your information with those hashtags, and people will find you, and then it's easier to develop that rapport and then get a link. From there, you also want to continue to offer value. When I say offer value, I don't mean necessarily give them an incentive. If you have something that's entertaining, that they might be into, send them a funny YouTube video. Or if you have a resource that they may not know about, send them that. If it's an infographic, whatever it is. It doesn't even have to be something that's on your site, just something that's relevant to the topic. Send it to them so that you're a valuable resource to them, somebody they might follow on Twitter.

Then, if you do have incentives, you want to dangle the carrot. You don't want to just be like, "Hey, we have free guitars. I can give you a guitar for a link." No, it doesn't work like that. What you want to do is create some sort of contest or campaign around that and invite them to join it.

For example, let's says I have 50 guitars to give away. I would just give them away to 50 people. What I do is I set up a contest where they write a blog post about guitars and link back to our site in question. Then, that way, it becomes a one-to-many thing rather than a one-to-one thing. When it's one-to-one, you get one link per guitar. I don't think that's really worthwhile. But if you can get 100 links per guitar, then it's worth a lot more.

Then, once you've actually closed a link prospect, maintain the rapport, and the best way to do that is just follow them on Twitter with a private list or make a link building circle on Google+. Make it private and just hit them up every once in a while just to maintain that rapport and send them some new content or just keep it going so when you have something else that you want to get a link from, you can easily just contact them, or they may even naturally just link to you again because they've seen that you continue to make awesome content.

So, with that, that's scalable link building using social media. My name is Michael King. Thank you again. Please follow me on Twitter, iPullRank.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Set It and Forget It SEO: Chasing the Elusive Passive SEO Dream

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 04:02 AM PST

Posted by russvirante

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Howdy, Mozzers. This is Russ Jones (@rjonesx) from Virante, Inc. I recently spoke at the Search Exchange conference in Charlotte, NC on the topic of programmatic, automated SEO solutions and realized that it could probably be more valuable in front of a larger audience. Of course, the attendees have a head start, so you better get to work.

Set It And Forget It I have a confession to make. I love infomercials. In fact, I would probably call myself an infomercial elitist / hipster. I liked infomercials before they were cool; before the Billy Mays and Slap Chop Guy made their way into internet memes. I pledge my allegiance to the godfather of infomercials, Ron Popeil, while guys like Anthony Sullivan weep at his alter, asking forgiveness for their sub-par jobs as pitchmen. OK, maybe I take it a little too seriously - I do happen to have a DVR full of Gator Grip, Ginsu Knives, and Flowbees - but I believe there is something extremely motivating about this type of advertising. And Ron Popeil hit it on the head over and over again: Set It and Forget It.

This was the tag line for the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie, an amazing success for infomercials. You see, there is an innate desire for us to find solutions to common, everyday problems that do not require our attention. These nagging, annoying problems like making dinner, cleaning up, and in our industry - SEO tedium - tend to suck up our time and attention while bringing only marginal improvements.

Unfortunately, there is this perception, almost bias, against automation in our space: a misbelief that there is nothing that we can set and forget in SEO. Well, I am here today to free you from the reigns of some of your daily miseries of SEO, all for the incredible price of free.

Strategy 1: Real Time Referrer Indexing

We often joke that "Google knows everything." While we can lament the loss of privacy and liberty, there is one thing that I do want Google to know about - my links. I want them to know about as many links pointing to my site as possible. Unfortunately, Google misses out on a good portion of the web. Well, what if you could find links that Google hasn't necessarily found, and then make sure that Google does index them and count them? Introducing Real Time Referrer Indexing:

If you were go into your Google Analytics right now and export all of the pages that have sent visitors to your site since your website's inception, what percentage of them do you think will have been indexed by Google? 90%, 95%, 99%? Sure, it will probably vary from site to site, especially given how many different sites out there have sent traffic to you, but there are likely to be a handful that Google never got around to crawling. Our goal with this first set-it and forget-it tactic is to find the pages that refer traffic to your site on-the-fly and make sure if they have a link, that Google knows about it.

Ideally, our automated solution would work like this...

The script would record every referrer from other sites.
The script would spider that site to see if it actually has a real, followed link.
The script would check to see if Google had cached that referring page with the followed link.
The script would coax Google to reindex that page if it had not yet found the link.
The script would continue to check to see if Google had cached the referring page.

This is actually quite easy to accomplish programmatically. The first three steps are done every day by tools regularly used by SEOs.The only difficult part is finding a way to encourage Google to visit the referring pages it has not yet indexed. We can solve this by simply having a widget on the page that displays those referrers, essentially an "As Seen On" bulleted list of pages that had linked to your site, but had not yet been indexed.

Temporarily Linking to Not-Yet Indexed Pages

Well, I have a treat for those of you who are or know someone with some half way decent programming skills. Here is sample code that does just this on your typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation. A word of warning - it is highly likely that this code is buggy. Make sure that you check it and make modifications before running it on production. All you need to do is install the script on any pages of your site for which you would like to perform real time referrer indexing.

This is exactly the type of set-it-and-forget-it SEO that I love. Simple techniques, simple solutions, long-term results.

So let's move on to another set-it-and-forget-it technique.

Strategy 2: On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery

Alright, so if you haven't heard of PageRank Recovery before, you are going to need a quick little lesson. Whenever someone links to your site, but screws up the URL, the PageRank that flows through that link essentially evaporates. I am pretty sure that it ends up in Matt Cutt's personal PageRank stash, which he has learned to convert into a powerful foodstuff that he consumes prior to mountain climbing and running marathons. But I digress, if you can find where those broken links point to on your site, then 301 those URLs to a real page, you can "recover" that PageRank. Virante created a tool to do just that based on SEOMoz's Site Intelligence API which Rand highlighted a little while ago, but it still requires you spend time going and running the tool regularly. I want to be lazy and have my site recover PageRank for me while I watch The Facts of Life dressed in a Snuggie and downing 5 hour energy shots. So here is how it would work:

Ideally, our program would do the following...

The script sits in your CMS right before a 404 is fired. If you don't have a CMS, you would direct your HTACCESS file to pass all 404 traffic through it first.
The script captures the URL that the visitor or GoogleBot tried to visit.
The script somehow magically knows what URL you MEANT to visit.
The script 301 redirects you there.

What's that you say? "But Russ, our programmers don't know magic. They are all muggles. And even if they did know magic, I can't find a USB powered wand anywhere these days." Well, I am bringing you good news from some friends: Mr. XML Sitemap and Ms. Levenshtein.

If you were paying attention to countless blog posts in the SEO world, you should have an XML Sitemap which keeps record of all the URLs on your site. This is a good start to the magic that is On-The-Fly PageRank Recovery, because now we know all the possible URLs your visitor or GoogleBot may have been trying to reach. Now, we simply have to find the most similar URL to the one the visitor came to. How do we accomplish this? Levenshtein Distance.

Levenshtein Distance, also known as the Edit Distance, is a measurement of the minimum number of changes necessary to convert one piece of text into another by adding a letter, removing a letter, or substituting a letter. For example, the Levenshtein Distance between the words "Rock" and "Russ" is 3, because we will have to substitute the O, C, and K with U, S, and S. Below is an example of how Levenshtein Distance could be used to find two similar URLs:

Levenshtein Distance

So, the way On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery works is by reading all the URLs in your sitemap and then comparing the Edit Distance between those URLs and the URL your visitor entered. If the server finds a close match, we then 301 redirect rather than show a 404 error. Subsequently, when a Googlebot tries to visit those previously 404 pages, it will instead find that 301 redirect and appropriately pass the PageRank through to the intended page. Plus, On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery is a huge usability win for visitors who now don't have to try and search your site to find the correct page.

Want to give it a test drive? Try any one of these broken links back to Virante and my blog, TheGoogleCache

Virante's Tool Page: http://www.virante.com/se9-toolz
Second Page Poaching: notice the dollar sign in the url

Now, It would be hypocritical of me to talk about setting it and forgetting it, and then make you go out and do all the work yourself to get it up and running. So, in the spirit of laziness, I have included a couple of options for you to use as well. Of course, double-check everything before you go into production with any code you ever get on the internet, regardless of whether or not it is on a trusted site like SEOmoz.

Final Thoughts

There are incredible opportunities in the world of Search Engine Optimization that we have only begun to address. So much more can be done in terms of describing, detecting, and repairing SEO issues all in a programatic, automated fashion. These are just two of them. Good luck, and keep inventing!

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Honor those who've served

Good afternoon,

For 92 years, our nation has set aside November 11th as a day to honor those who have served in our armed forces. Originally, the day was set aside to celebrate the veterans of the First World War. Later, it was broadened to include every man and woman who has worn the uniform of the United States. And today, we continue that tradition by honoring the service and sacrifice of our troops and veterans.

But I believe that this commemoration should last much longer than just 24 hours, once a year. That's why Jill Biden and I launched the Joining Forces initiative to honor, recognize, and support the veterans and military families who have given our nation so much. We're issuing a call to all Americans, so that everyone asks themselves one simple question: How can I give back?

We've been overwhelmed by responses from across the country. Businesses are hiring more veterans. Nonprofit organizations are working with military children. And individuals all across the country have stepped up to help out in their community. How will you give back?

Sign up for an opportunity to volunteer in your community, pledge service hours in honor of military families, or send a message of thanks to America's heroes.

Find service opportunities, pledge hours of service, send your message of thanks, get involved

Our efforts with Joining Forces come on top of the many actions my husband has made on behalf of our veterans and military families.

He's worked to send 600,000 veterans back to school on the Post-9/11 GI Bill and taken steps to help veterans translate military experience to the private sector job market. He repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" -- so that our troops don't have to live a lie in order to serve the country they love. He ended the war in Iraq -- our service men and women there will be home for the holidays. And just yesterday, the Senate passed two tax credits that he proposed to encourage businesses to hire America's veterans and wounded warriors.

So inside and outside of government, we're building a wave of support to honor and recognize our veterans and their families. We can use your help. Today, let's all find a new way that we can get involved in our communities, not just for Veterans Day, but every day.

Visit JoiningForces.gov and sign up today.

Thank you,

Michelle Obama

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Video: "Super Duper Space Wrench"

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Friday Nov.11, 2011

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This week, the President attended the G-20 Summit in France, announced new efforts to help put veterans back to work, ordered reforms of Head Start Programs, signed an executive order to cut waste in government, and welcomed the President of Portugal.

Check out your behind-the-scenes guide to the President's week here:

SEOptimise

Who Should Represent Your Brand on the Social Web?

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 04:15 AM PST

This post originally appeared on State of Search.

Given that engaging on the social web can benefit your brand's marketing, recruitment, PR, sales, customer service, and other departments, the question of 'who should manage and represent your brand on the social web?' will inevitably arise. The answer is, all of them.

I believe that all employees with a passion and interest in representing the brand should be encouraged to. Utilising the expertise and networks of the people within your business is incredibly valuable when it comes to engaging on the social web and is not something that can be easily outsourced.

It sounds obvious, but many businesses give a variety of social media responsibilities to the PR team, the tech team or external agencies, which is fine, but social media is not about using tools, it's about extending your current business activities into the landscape of social media to identify opportunities. It should therefore ideally be the responsibility of the people within the business, assisted by those with experience in recommending tools and strategies to increase effectiveness and productivity.

The first step to creating an effective and sustainable social media strategy is creating an internal structure that makes the most of employee's strengths and interests.

However, getting employees to engage on behalf of the brand is easier said than done, and there are many potential issues that need to be prepared for prior to jumping in. Remember that everything you publish on the social web represents your brand and adds to your brand's online shadow, and this is why I believe businesses encouraging staff to engage should implement a social media council.

The power of having a Social Media Council

Given that the brand's involvement in social media may benefit multiple departments within a company, it makes a lot of sense to have a social media council made up of a representative from each major department involved in the brand's social media strategy.

The role of the social media council is to develop the guidelines, policy and direction to allow anyone within the business to represent the brand on the social web effectively and safely.

An example social media structure incorporating a social media council:

The collective wisdom of the social media council will be incredibly powerful, but without someone who can objectively absorb the social media council's goals and provide a strategy that utilises the tools, networks and techniques available to achieve those goals, the council's wisdom and power will not be used to its full potential. This is where I personally believe an outside expert or social media agency is best situated in a social media strategy (in most cases).

When the social media council and head of strategy have produced a carefully planned strategy and set of guidelines, it should then be safe and effective for employees to interact on the social web on behalf of the brand.

When you know who is going to represent the brand, the next step is how.

How to represent your brand on social media

One of the most commonly debated questions when brands enter social media is 'how should we represent ourselves?' With so many options to choose from it's important to remember what your brand stands for and how you want to be perceived on the social web, because there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to setting up your profiles.

Do you want to 'humanise' the brand by getting employees to tweet from personal accounts, giving insight into their lives? Or does your brand need to retain its mystery and glamour by not presenting itself as overly 'humanised'? Here are some guidelines, which are by no means factual but simply my perception of what different account structures suggest about a brand.

Account structure	Impression that this gives the brand
Company account with anonymous person tweeting	Impersonal, mysterious, corporate. Does not 'humanise' the brand. This approach works well for 'mysterious' brands that are not expected to be personal or accessible.
Company account with employees tweeting from company account	Personal and gives the brand a 'humanised' element, but lacks insight into the lives of the people behind the company. Often results in an inconsistent mixture of corporate & personal tone / message.
Company account with fictional character tweeting	Personal, fun and interactive. Lacks the human element, but if a brand is well associated with a mascot, this can be effective. Wonga, SEOmozand Compare the Market are great examples of brands using this approach.
Employees tweeting from personal accounts	Highly personal and human, gives insight into the lives of the people behind the company, reducing the friction between the brand and customers.
Company account with employees tweeting + employees tweeting from personal accounts.	Good balance of being personal, human, allowing people to develop relationships with the people behind the brand if they want to, but company account also maintains corporate feel.

The decision of which approach to take should be decided between the social media council, who will be able to make an informed decision on how the brand needs to be represented to achieve the goals outlined in the brand's social media strategy. Here are several examples of different approaches that brands have taken, to give you inspiration on which may work best for you.

Example of a brand account with fictional characters tweeting on behalf of the brand:

Example of a brand account with employees tweeting (see left hand 'tweet fleet'):

Example of a brand account with employees tweeting as well as from personal accounts:

Final thoughts

I asked some industry experts what their thoughts were on who should represent a brand on social media and how. A big thanks to Rand Fishkin and Luke Brynley-Jones who kindly shared their thoughts.

"I believe strongly in enabling authentic social media use by employees and encouraging those who want to participate more with the brand and community to do so. However, I’m not a fan of forced social contributions – for some folks, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ aren’t great public outlets."

For that reason (and many others), I much prefer each brand to have its own, corporate voice that’s not uniquely tied to an individual. At SEOmoz, that brand voice is represented by Roger Mozbot, our mascot, and while many folks use the SEOmoz Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. accounts to publicly speak “as the brand”, they don’t identify themselves as such. It’s like getting into the Mickey Mouse costume at Disney World. As far as park attendees are concerned, you’re Mickey. Nothing more. And when you take off the suit, you should be who you really are."

- Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SEOmoz

“Staff should be encouraged to participate in social media, but within a clearly defined framework set out by the company. The framework can be open (e.g. Zappos) or closely managed within a CRM process (e.g. Dell), but the bottom line is: it needs to be clear and understood from the outset. The question is: how can you leverage the personal knowledge and networks of your staff without either (a) courting PR disaster or (b) crushing them under brand guidelines and CRM Service Level Agreements? The answer is: carefully.”

- Luke Brynley-Jones, founder & CEO of Our Social Times

Who do you think should manage and represent a brand's social media presence? I'd be interested in hearing people's experiences with different strategies, so feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter (my handle is @MarcusATaylor)